We connect the platforms. We do not compete with them.
A prior art search finishes in one platform. The results are exported, re-keyed into a second, summarized to a colleague, and docketed back into the system of record by hand. Every one of those systems is measured. The space between them is not.
Cblindspot is a neutral interconnection, measurement and orchestration layer between IP management systems and the specialized IP & LegalTech platforms a team already runs. It connects those systems, runs work across them, and records what each step cost, how long it took, and what it returned.
It does not search, it does not draft, and it does not manage a portfolio. That restraint is not a gap in the roadmap. It is the condition that makes the measurement worth reading.
Four things Cblindspot will not sell you
A layer that competed with the platforms it measures could not be trusted to measure them. So the boundary is drawn explicitly, and it holds.
Not an IP management system.
Cblindspot connects to the IPMS a team already runs. It does not manage portfolios, deadlines or docketing, and it does not replace the system of record. The IPMS stays the single source of truth, and Cblindspot sits underneath everything else and keeps it in sync.
Not a patent search engine.
Questel Orbit Intelligence, FluidityIQ and the other search platforms search. Cblindspot triggers the search, chains it, and carries the result to the step that follows.
Not a drafting platform.
ABIGAIL, Specifio and PatentPal draft. Cblindspot connects what a drafting platform produces to the steps that follow it, and records what each one cost in time and money.
Not a workflow product that replaces your process.
Cblindspot does not build IP workflows from scratch. Every step is a connection to a system the team already chose. The platform owns the movement between steps, never the work inside them.
Naming a product here is a statement about what that product does. It is not a claim that Cblindspot connects to it, the live connector list is further down this page, and it is shorter than this one.
We also do not sell the platforms we connect, measure and compare. There is no product of ours competing in any category we score.
The blind spot the company is named after
The wave of AI platforms that reached IP and legal work over the past two years is capable, and every new one is another island. The work still travels between them by hand: exported, re-keyed, docketed back manually, waiting in someone’s inbox. Nothing measures that space.
That space is the operational blind spot the company is named after. It is where the hours that AI was supposed to save quietly disappear, and it is the one part of an IP operation that no single system inside it can measure, because measuring the handoffs between systems means measuring the systems themselves.
Cblindspot was cofounded by Sacha Lafaurie after twenty years inside the IP industry, including Questel and DeepIP. Where that observation came from also matters. Both are vendors in the market Cblindspot now measures, and a founder who has worked that side of the table knows how a neutrality promise is bent in practice. That is why the commitments below are structural rather than declarative.
Our mission
To make the space between IP & LegalTech systems connected, measured and open to scrutiny, without becoming another system competing for it.
That is one sentence because it is one commitment. Everything below it on this page is either a mechanism that enforces it, a dated fact that tests it, or a person accountable for it.
Neutrality is a set of refusals, not a posture
A value that costs nothing to hold is not a value. Anyone can claim independence. Each commitment below is enforced by a rule we have published, each of them can be used against us, and all of them are set out in full in our Neutrality Policy.
No vendor can buy anything.
Placement, rankings, scores and favorable comparisons are not for sale. Scores come from a documented methodology applied identically to every product, and a commercial relationship with Cblindspot never enters the calculation. Experts who assess products are paid by Cblindspot, never by the vendor under review, and must disclose their conflicts.
The buy side stays the buy side.
Employees of the vendors in our catalog may not hold buyer-side accounts, and this is enforced automatically rather than promised: registrations from the domains of the products and vendors in the catalog are blocked at signup, and the blocklist follows the catalog as it grows. When a domain rule catches the wrong account, a founder reviews the appeal.
Measurement over marketing.
Every orchestrated run is logged, cost, speed and quality, per platform and per step. That is what a team compares platforms on: what each one delivered in production, on their own work, rather than what a vendor's sales material claimed. Usage and measurement data from a customer's workflows is never sold or disclosed to vendors, and never used to advantage one vendor over another.
We describe relationships precisely.
A partnership is a joint commitment announced by both sides. A connector is a system we reach on the interfaces it publishes. Microsoft, Slack, the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the European Patent Office are connectors: they are not commercial partners of Cblindspot, have not endorsed the platform, and have no commitment to it. We say so on the announcements themselves, because a market that uses the word partner loosely is a market where the word stops carrying information.
Practitioners do not change how they work.
No system is removed and no data is migrated. The IP management system stays the source of truth, and the work reaches people in Microsoft Word, in the browser through the Chrome extension, and in Slack, which is in pilot. Inventors are never charged, on any plan. Adoption that depends on people abandoning their habits is not adoption.
Where we are today
The first version of the platform was released on 19 August 2026. This is a young company, and we would rather be checked than believed. Every item below is published, dated and linkable.
Strategic partnership with PSS Solutions to co-develop IPMSBench, an open, vendor-neutral benchmark standard for evaluating IP management systems. The methodology and first evaluation framework are expected in Q4 2026, published and versioned so that any IP department, advisor or vendor can review how systems are assessed.
FluidityIQ becomes the first vendor live on the connector catalog. The agreement is not exclusive.
Partnerships with PioneerIP and ABIGAIL, both live as connectors.
First working session of the Open IP Council, an initiative convened by Roger Hahn and open to anyone working in or around patent practice. Cblindspot took part, alongside prosecutors, in-house counsel, vendors and a patent-portfolio valuation specialist.
First release of the platform.
Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Slack, the USPTO and the EPO become reachable as connected surfaces. These are connectors, not partnerships.
What is connected today.
Live connectors run for Questel Orbit Intelligence, FluidityIQ, ABIGAIL and PioneerIP, alongside patent office data from the USPTO and the EPO, with Microsoft Word and Excel reachable inside the applications themselves and Slack in pilot. That is eight third-party systems in production and one in pilot. Behind them sits a catalog of more than 2,100 IP & LegalTech products, and that catalog is what tells us which connector to build next.
What is not connected today, and it is the one you will ask about.
No IP management system vendor connector is live. Anaqua, Clarivate IPfolio, Questel Equinox and the other systems of record are catalog entries on the roadmap, not connections in production. A department can today run and measure workflows across search, drafting, the two patent offices and the desktop applications its people already use, and take the measurement record away with it. What it cannot yet do is have Cblindspot write back into its system of record automatically. That is the next thing being built, and stating it here is cheaper for both sides than discovering it on the second call.
There is no customer proof on this page.
No customer has agreed to be named, so there is no logo row and no installed base to claim, a logo row assembled without that agreement would contradict every paragraph above it. Design partners are being selected now to shape IPMSBench. Until a customer speaks on the record, what is offered instead is the measurement log itself: what the platform delivered in your environment, on your work, rather than what this page asserts.
Five white papers and reports are published. Each is free, and each asks for a name and an email address before the file opens. They include a market landscape study built on 1,317 verified vendor signals across 676 independent sources.
What happens to your data
Unpublished applications and prosecution files are the most sensitive material an IP department holds, so this belongs above the contact form rather than in a footer link.
Cblindspot SAS, the Paris entity, is registered in France, and our terms are governed by French law with exclusive jurisdiction in the courts of Paris. Data is encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit. EU data residency is available for European customers. GDPR compliance is full and a Data Processing Agreement is available on request. Workflow data, stack configurations and decisions are never used to train or fine-tune any AI model.
On SOC 2, the position is exactly the one our security page states: security controls are implemented across the security, availability and confidentiality principles, and a formal Type II audit and report have not yet been pursued. We would rather write that sentence than compress it into two words that would not survive your security review.
The people accountable for it
The team works distributed.
Sacha Lafaurie
Chief Executive Officer - Cofounder
Twenty years inside the IP industry, seven of them in the United States. Every category, every buyer dynamic and every vendor commercial model was learned from inside the industry rather than from secondary research, which is also why the commitments above are structural rather than declarative.
- Eleven years at Questel, latterly running a $100 million profit and loss across eighty people and twenty-five acquisitions
- VP Global Sales at DeepIP
- Seven years based in the United States
- PhD in economic geography
Andy Garcia
Chief Technology Officer - Cofounder
Andy owns the technical architecture: backend infrastructure, agent orchestration, MCP integrations, the data pipeline and the instrumentation engine. He came to IP from AI and SaaS, and describes the interesting problem as the space between systems rather than any one of them, the handoffs, the decisions that happen in email, the steps nobody has ever measured.
- Founder of Tugan AI
- Seven years building and scaling SaaS and AI applications
- Full-stack: AI, DevOps and data platforms
- Owns backend infrastructure, agent orchestration and MCP integrations
Sylvain Goiran
Chief Product Officer - Cofounder
Twenty-five years in IP analytics and product intelligence, and a founder three times over before this one. Sylvain brings insider platform knowledge and product architecture depth, and the translation between what an IP professional needs and what a technical specification has to say.
- Founder of Gem32, acquired by Questel
- Founder of IPSTAT and CRISP IP
- Twenty-five years in IP analytics and product intelligence
- AI and LLM integration for patent prosecution and analytics workflows
Thierry Paul
Chief eXperience Officer - Cofounder
Formerly Chief IP at ServiceNow. Thierry owns the vendor and client relationship, workflow design and innovation. Twenty-five years leading IP organizations at the intersection of technology, innovation and business, defining and executing enterprise-wide IP strategies and managing patent portfolios across artificial intelligence, telecommunications and simulation technologies.
- Formerly Chief IP at ServiceNow
- Twenty-five years in intellectual property, technology and innovation leadership
- IP governance, invention programs, patent prosecution and competitive intelligence
- Bachelor of Electrical Engineering, Polytechnique Montréal
Working with us
There is no careers page, because there are no open listings to point you at today. If you work in IP operations, in prosecution, or on the engineering side of either, and the position set out on this page is one you would want to build, write to us and say so. Those conversations start earlier than a job advertisement does.
If you build an IP or LegalTech product and you would like clients to use it inside their workflows, but you do not have the time or the engineering resources to build the connector yourself, we will build the integration and make your product available across the ecosystem, with no engineering effort on your side. Listing in the catalog is free, vendor-provided content is labeled as such, and neither one can influence a score or a comparison.
If you practice in IP and want to sit on the assessment side rather than the vendor side, experts are paid by Cblindspot and are asked to declare their conflicts before they review anything.
If your department is evaluating or replacing its IP management system, design partners are being selected now to shape IPMSBench.
Get in touch
Questions about the platform, a partnership, the catalog or anything written on this page reach the same address. If this page raised a question it did not answer, about the IPMS gap, about security, or about who is using the platform, put it in the message and it will be answered in writing.